ABSTRACT
In March 1997, Marshall Herff Applewhite (“Do”) and 38 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult2 committed suicide at Rancho Santa Fe, California, in order to “beam up” to a UFO supposedly hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet-a spacecraft which they believed would transport them to the “Level Above Human,” or the “literal heavens.” Later, two members who had been left behind committed what the press unkindly, but accurately, called “copycat suicide.” Pundits, journalists, and members of the clergy explained the mass suicides as the result of “brainwashing.” To separate people from the commonsense world of responsibility, families, sex, and credit cards, to keep them in a “metamorphic classroom” taught by a “Rep” from heaven (for over twenty years), and finally to get them to swallow a lethal concoction of phenobarbitals, vodka, and applesauce in order to rendezvous with a UFO on the other side of a comet-this radical agenda had to be the result of massive brainwashing. To many, the brainwashing hypothesis was convincing, especially because it seemed to link Heaven’s Gate to the Jonestown suicides in 1978 and to the Branch Davidians who perished near Waco, Texas in 1993. The same theory could be used to explain the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways by Aum Shinrikyô and why over a thousand people continued to be loyal to Aum even after extensive media coverage of the cult’s abductions, tortures, and murders.
